Card Rich, Cash Poor

 

I suspect that over the course of the last two years a new major class of baseball card collector has emerged: the Card Rich, Cash Poor collector.  I am one of them.

This is kind of a lucky thing to be, though it also has its drawbacks.  Basically this is the collector who is not wealthy and does not have a high paying job (cash poor) but prior to the explosion in prices had been able to build up a decent collection of old cards when they were cheap and is now sitting on a collection worth many times what was originally paid for it (card rich).

In retrospect I now realize that I was pretty lucky to get back into baseball cards at the time I did, because I have a pretty decent vintage American card collection (which I don't talk about much on here) which I was fortunate enough to put together at exactly the right moment, allowing me to boast of being card rich and cash poor today.

For about a six year period between 2009 and 2015 I dabbled a bit in selling old Japanese video games that I scoured from junk bins in second hand shops.  This generated a couple hundred bucks or so a month, sometimes more, which I treated as kind of "found money".Since it was accumulating in a Paypal account, I decided to find out what that whole Ebay thing everyone was talking about was and I ended up going down the vintage baseball card listing rabbit hole.

I was pretty amazed to find that vintage cards which had been so crazily in demand back in the late 80s/ early 90s when I had previously collected were so plentiful and cheap.  It was like I was a kid in a candy store, I basically started converting most of my video game sales money into old baseball cards every month, month after month for six years.

Around 2015 or so my supply of old video games started to dry up, and with it my baseball card budget, so my six year spending spree came to an end, but not before I had built up a pretty decent collection.  Which is now worth several times more than what I paid for it back then.

On the one hand, this is great.  The "I hope my wife doesn't find out how much I'm spending on baseball cards" stress that I felt back in 2009-2015 has been replaced with a much better "How do I tell my wife that my baseball card collection is worth enough to cover a significant portion of our kids' university tuition in the future?" feeling.  Its way better than if the reverse had happened, I can tell you.

On the other hand though, its also destroyed the collecting goals I used to have.  For example, one thing I had dreamed of doing was putting together a 1956 Topps set, which I've always thought was the most beautiful.  I was able to piece together all of the major stars in the set (pictured above) except Williams and Mantle.  I didn't pay more than 100$ for any of those cards (PSA 4 Jackie Robinson was the most expensive at 95$) and the Williams would have easily been in my budget and even the Mantle would have been feasible.  

But the run up in prices over the past two years has crushed that idea - I wouldn't be able to afford any of those cards today. While the value of my collection has soared my regular income has stayed the same.  So while I'm happy to have this really amazing partial 1956 set, I'm also frustrated to know that it is one I'll never be able to complete.  There are a few others that fall into the same category.

I suspect that there are a lot of collectors out there in a similar situation.  What do we do with these cards?  Hold onto them even though they are part of collecting goals that are no longer feasible?  Sell them to raise money for things we actually need even though we really like them?  

Its not a bad situation to be in and I'm not complaining about it, but I'm curious if the scale of collectors in this situation might result in new hobby trends.  

Kevin Maas of the Hanshin Tigers

 

This card is sort of an age test.  If you are old enough to have been collecting baseball cards in 1990 then you know that for a little while in the summer of that year this was one of the hottest cards in the hobby.  If you started collecting in 1991 or later, this is just some random common from the 1990 Upper Deck set.

I remember Kevin Maas very well since he got called up to the Yankees in the middle of the 1990 season to replace my favorite player at the time, Don Mattingly.  Maas went on a tear and made huge headlines for hitting his first 10 home runs in just 72 at bats, the fastest to do so in MLB history.  He kept up the pace and hit 21 home runs in just half a season, making him one of the most sought after rookie cards for collectors that year.

Then 1991 came around and he fell to Earth, never repeating his success in his rookie year and was out of the Majors by 1995.

An interesting post-script to his career though is that in the middle of the 1996 season he signed on with the Hanshin Tigers to replace Glenn Davis who left the team in June.  He came over with big expectations and owing to the phonetic similarity of his last name to that of Randy Bass Tigers fans were able to use their Randy Bass song to cheer for him (not an impressive fact per se, but a pretty neat piece of trivia nonetheless).

Despite the high expectations, Maas didn't hit much better in NPB than he had in MLB and after 68 games with the Tigers in which he just hit .245 with 8 home runs he retired from the game.

As far as I can tell (and anyone who knows otherwise please correct me: EDIT: Twitter came through, he does have a card in a BBM subset that I had missed), Maas doesn't have any baseball cards of him as a Hanshin Tiger, since he only played half a season and, as a late signing, missed out on being in any of the 1996 sets.  In fact even when I do a Google image search for him in Japanese the only photo I can find of him as a Tiger is this grainy black and white head shot:

So he's basically a guy without any cards.  But I discovered by accident the other day that he does appear as a Tiger in an alternative medium: on the Nintendo 64.

I've had one of these for years and since my son got interested in baseball a few months ago I pulled out an old game for it: Hyper Space Night Game: Pro Baseball King.  

If you haven't heard of it, it was a Japan only release.  It features all 12 NPB teams from the 1996 season (the year the game was released).  For a 26 year old baseball game, it holds up pretty well and we like to play it a lot.  Current Dragons manager Kazuyoshi Tatsunami appears as a player on it so we play the Dragons a lot.

The other day though we were playing a game with the Hanshin Tigers and I was surprised to see that the game has as the Tigers #3 batter none other than Kevin Maas!

Its a bit hard to see his face - and all the players in Hyperspace Night Game Pro Yakyu King look the same anyway - but that is his name in the lower left hand corner of the screen there:

He hits for pretty decent power in this game, which came out in December of 1996, by which time he had already left the Tigers but presumably they had actually made the game earlier than its release date. 

Anyway, I thought this was a kind of neat anomaly - a recognizable name player who doesn't have a baseball card of himself with a team but does appear in a video game as a member of that team.  So if you are a Kevin Maas collector and want something - anything - of him as a Hanshin Tiger, this game  might be your only option.